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Saturday, August 29, 2009

"Homeschooling" Censored At The Boston Globe

Over the last couple of days, after posting a comment on a vapid Boston Globe article titled - Pressure Cooker Kindergarten....I have received a substantial number of blog hits. Here's what I said:

Massachusetts is a pretty tough place to have a discussion about education. Just look, even though as I type this comment, this article is the *most e-mailed* story in the Globe....yet there are only a whopping THREE comments posted!

People here know nothing about education. First and foremost they believe that learning is something that happens in a specified place (school) for a specified time (12-16 years). But they couldn't possibly be more wrong. Ever wonder why the 'older set' here can't even figure out how to get both their cable box and their television power on concurrently?

Ans. - They are *lapsed-learners*.

Learning is ideally a lifelong, everyday, self-directed process. Grades and degrees have never been more worthless in history than they are today.

My son is 4.75 years old. Instead of spending roughly 2 hours per day getting him ready for and transporting him to preschool - as everyone else sheepishly does....I utilize that time to teach him myself. He's fully literate, using his own email account, googling everyday, and numerate beyond anyone's wildest expectations. After only a single year of my tutelage he's gone from tracing letters and numbers to the point where multiplication and division (long, with remainders) are cake; he's fluent in negative numbers, primes, a bit of geometry, triangular numbers, factorials, and even pre-algebra. Just before dinner tonight he randomly hollered at me that "29 and 31 were twin primes". Yet most of his age-mates around town who are *socialized* by pre-school can barely say hello to adults.

My son is hardly smarter than other kids his age. The difference is his days are spent with a complete-sentence-wielding, competent adult...and doing *work* each morning after breakfast for 1-2 hours. We do this every single day no matter the holiday or the season. It's efficient; it's green(!); it generates serious educational momentum; and the results speak for themselves. He'll be done 6th grade math this winter, and yet won't be legally eligible for kindergarten until six months later.

You guys can jawbone ad nauseam about the *optimal* ways to teach kids nonsense in K-12 hoosegows - but meaningful improvements will remain elusive. Y'all need to study the history of age-segregated, government education instead of blindly accepting the institutional status quo. Y'all need to start comparing your results to those of homeschoolers and other *alternative* methods of education - instead of just looking at facsimile schools *one town over*.

There have been many societies throughout history which achieved near 100% literacy. Meanwhile Boston has what, 20% of its students categorized as *special ed* by rent-seeking specialists?

For those few of you out there with open minds...to learn about the untold history of factory schooling:

So at least a few people called me an outright *liar* and those comments I really do cherish. Throughout my life, people have always had a hard time determining whether or not what I said is *serious* or not. Even my wife is once in a while totally bewildered. Curiously, the only one on the planet whom I can never fool is my 4.75 year old son - PrinceC-Nut!

Just now I went to the comment section of that article again only to discover that some Boston Globe satrap deleted my initial comment!

Why?!?!?!

What could have been so offensive about mentioning homeschooling and how I educate my son?

Those illiberal clowns there spend a whole lot of time deleting comments these days. Here is how they used to do it:

But now they expunge all trace of the comment - lest anyone realize how many comments they actually delete! Probably a good half of the comments I see, or have been seeing until now, have been trenchant ripostes to their *journalism*. There's no way the Globies are going to stand for that. It took a lot of hard work to whittle their readership down to a bankruptcy-inducing nothing....they'll be darned to let some pajama-clad, basement-dwelling blogger-types come in, adulterate their agitprop, and possibly widen the scope of their audience!

Note that despite my comment being deleted, I was still able to reproduce it here on this post.

You see, these clowns are predictable; I generally save, right away, all substantial comments that I make on account of Moron predictability - especially in hostile territory!

Tyrant? For what, for NOT extorting an education for your children from taxpayers?

A bit harsh.

I enjoyed the argument whereby you were supposed to stop educating your child lest he be picked on. So I imagine these people(/parents?) catch their children reading "too much" and grab the book out of their hands and scold them for over-achieving?

*Education* is a religion here in Mass, right up there with the Red Sox. We have more colleges than you could shake a stick at.

Nonetheless people here are profoundly ignorant and the only things that keep their denial afloat are *groupthink* and expensive, worthless *degrees*. Renegade homeschooling attacks on both of those fronts.

My own mother, the Prince's grandmother, can't even embrace what we've done so far educationally.

Probably tens of thousands of people read my comment. There were only a few written criticisms. Though you can see on the graphic 42 people *Recommended* one rebuttal that called me weird and/or a liar.

If memory serves me, only about 8 people had *Recommended* my initial comment.

We're not going to move anytime soon - I don't think. The state may be a hellhole, and the weather pure torture,....but our particular little region has proven a real oasis. Seriously.

If I can get Naples for two months every winter I'll be content - that's all.